Google Cloud will run on 100% renewable energy this year – Cloud Pro

Google will meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by the end of the year, the company has revealed on the 10th anniversary of the company’s environmental report.

The company revealed it has reduced energy overheads, which refers to the power used for non-computing tasks to 12%, while using its own-developed machine learning to operate its data centres has reduced energy consumption by an additional 15%.

“As more and more companies transform their businesses digitally, or build new ones, renewable energy is increasingly critical,” the company’s Chris Talbott, head of cloud storage product marketing, and Kate Brandt, sustainability lead at Google said in a blog post.

“As businesses, we affect the environment in ways often not clearly visible. Continued and accelerated digital transformation will generate a large digital exhaust. Some projections have data centers consuming as much as 13 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030,” the duo added.

They explained that if businesses don’t choose sustainable IT sources, the tech industry’s actions will have a significant impact on the environment. Sustainability should be a key factor when deciding which technology providers a business will use, alongside price, security, openness and reliability.

Google suggested that to reduce their environmental footprint, businesses can make better decisions by moving to the cloud, such as Google Cloud platform, or choosing cloud-based productivity suites (such as G Suite). Cold storage is also a way of reducing the impact a business’s operations will have on the environment.

“For each unit of electricity we use as a company, we’ve committed to purchasing an equivalent amount (or more) of renewable energy,” Talbott and Brandt added. “This includes the energy we use to power all our Google Cloud users. We also have a high bar for the energy we purchase: We strive to buy renewable energy from projects that are new to the grid, enabling those developers to finance and add even more green power. In fact, Google is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world.”